Jenny Beth Penson is volunteering as an intern with the Santiago Partnership. Jenny Beth participated in the Women’s Medical Caravan earlier this month, offering massage and physical therapy along with other needs as they arose. She shared her testimony of her time serving with the caravan.
“We drove about 8 hours from Cayambe into the jungle region, where we took a canoe (with a motor don’t worry) for about an hour and a half out to the community where we would be staying and serving for the next few days. It was called Puka Peña and it was a community of about 150-200 people, their houses within the jungle trees, out of site from where we “camped” in the cleared out area. We set up our caravan--a team of women serving women (lots of the women brought their families so we saw men too, but our focus was on women). We had three nurse practitioners that saw patients and treated them with the medicine they brought as best they could. This gave us a good first touch point and we hope to return to the community in the future with more ideas and more educational materials that ideally will help support them in creating their own medical system based on the strengths and resources already available in the community. We also had some dentists on our team that were able to do cleanings, fill cavities, and do extractions. I helped with a lot of different things throughout the week. I did some massages for people with upper back or arm pain and did stretching demonstrations for a lot of people with body pain (more physical therapy format than relaxation as we did not have the time or space or cultural competency to do massage in that way). The majority of the people spend their time working the land where they live so their bodies came with a lot of tension and aches. I also helped my coworker (who is a clinical psychologist) do some workshops about the cycle of violence and how violence particularly can affect women. We also did Women’s workshops to provide education about menstruation and reproduction to women in majority world countries. Along with the small workshop on these topics, free kits were handed out with reusable pads that can be washed and kept for up to five years. Super cool! We had a dynamic team of women from US, Ecuador, and Finland all with a heart to serve women and learn about a new culture. It was fascinating to see how these communities are still living to this day--so far away from society, no internet, no electricity, no easy access to the outside world or its resources. Some of the people had been to a medical clinic before... but it had taken them about 3 hours to get there. Even all the way out there, we learned from faithful “hermanas” that support women’s programs through the Evangelical Covenant Church in the jungle region. See below the photo of a small church that one of the hermanas on the caravan helped plant a few years ago (this church was even 25 minutes farther in the boat from Puka Peña).
Our last day, we did the caravan in another community of the Secoya people. This community, made up of about 50 families, speaks a completely different language and are distinct from most of the others around them. The kids attend school, but even there, the teacher translates the materials from Spanish into their Secoyan language. It was very interesting to learn about their community and we wish we had known more about them before we got there. One of the mornings we went out at 5am before the day started and got to see some of the amazing biodiversity of the Amazon jungle which included monkeys, dozens of different bird species, and even pink river dolphins! A species of freshwater dolphins that are a pink-ish color and live only in the Amazon and Orinoco rivers of South America. So cool! It is always such a gift to see God at work in different places in the world, knowing he loves and cares for His people better than we ever could.”
